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Introduction to Live Chat

This article is no longer maintained, so its content might be out of date.

Live Chat, part of the Firefox Support community, is an interactive way to help users solve problems and learn about Firefox. The diverse community of Firefox Support contributors consists of people from all over the world with a wide variety of experiences. If you enjoy helping others and using Firefox, Live Chat may be for you. See Helping with Live Chat for a guide on getting started.

Table of Contents

Mechanics of Live Chat

Live Chat makes use of the open source Spark client to handle chat requests from users. Once you are signed into Spark, you can start helping with chat sessions.

Accepting a chat

Global canned responses consist of common instructions and knowledge base links. Many questions can be answered by simply pointing a user to the correct knowledge base link. The responses are organized into categories:

Using Firefox: Knowledge base links to help people use Firefox features

Resources: Commonly used resources that don't fit into another category are kept here, such as about:config

Following up: Instructions for users to follow up after ending the chat session

Administration: Links to chat rules and templates for ending a chat due to abuse.

RRRT: Temporary information for new issues under investigation.

Tags: Shortcuts for adding chat tags (see below) to the current chat.

Common instructions: Instructions that are referenced frequently while troubleshooting. (Obtaining a screenshot on different operating systems, accessing Task Manager/Activity Monitor, etc)

Chat tags

Everyone has the ability to tag chats while answering them using the /tag command. Tags help organize chats and can help in finding a transcript later. Some common tags are listed below. To add the 'crash' tag to the current chat, just type /tag crash.

Room monitors

Some of our most active contributors become Room Monitors and are able to watch chats without joining them. Room Monitors are here to help - they are great people to ask if you need a second opinion on how to handle a chat. Room Monitors also keep track of which issues are most common and help other contributors find answers to questions.

Learn more

We're glad to have you as a member of the Firefox Support community! Don't hesitate to ask us questions in Contributors to learn more about helping and the issues that users face. We also maintain several resources to consult as a guide to effectively help users.